


Strange Lovers

by akadiene



Series: Fiddle and Coal [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Coal Mining, Coming of Age, F/M, Forced coming out, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Past Domestic Violence, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Violence, compulsory heterosexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 04:46:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10712478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akadiene/pseuds/akadiene
Summary: August to October, 1958: Will Poindexter learned about fear. Derek Nurse was wildly fucking terrifying.





	Strange Lovers

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly -- please take the tags seriously. This story is rated M not because of sexual content, but because of the things I mentioned in the tags. It's not an easy or happy story (though I think it has its good moments), and if you read fic for escapism, or if you have a fear of being underground, this might not be the one for you. However, despite any possible ambiguity in the writing itself, I can guarantee you that no character we care about dies, either during the events of this story or after. I know those tags can be scary, so be mindful of them.
> 
> Secondly -- I am in no way a historian. I'm just a business student with a deep deep love for my province and for the people who live there. So while I've tried to do as much research as possible to offset this, there are definitely some historical inaccuracies. I'm sorry if I got things wrong and I meant no disrespect -- in fact quite the opposite. For this reason the place names in this are real but the people are not. So if you have any questions about sources (or characterization, settings, plot, or anything at all) I'm going to gather them and try to answer them in a more detailed author's commentary which I'll post to my [tumblr](http://www.bluegrasshole.tumblr.com) within the next week. You can ask them here or in my blog inbox. I'd love to chat about this. UPDATE: Author's notes as well as my blog can be found [here](http://bluegrasshole.tumblr.com/post/160236695416/authors-commentary-of-strange-lovers-a-nurseydex).
> 
> Finally -- If you've been following me on tumblr since at least mid-february then you know I've been obsessed with this story/coal mining since then (I even have [a tag](http://fatlardo.tumblr.com/tagged/strange+lovers+tag) for it -- check it out), so you'll be glad I'm fiiiiinally going to stop talking about it. Thank you to everyone who cheered me on while writing this even though there's no way I can name everyone. It was without a doubt the hardest thing I've ever written and I put a lot of myself in it, so your kind words and encouragement means so much.
> 
> I can, however, thank two people by name: [Heather](http://www.duanlarissa.tumblr.com), who helped me out when I thought this was only going to be 6000 words (lmao), and who let me know when things made sense, when they didn't, and when stuff was just straight up bad. I'm really grateful for that, so thank you. 
> 
> And [Jenna](http://www.angeryginger.tumblr.com), who somehow immediately _got_ it, talked me through the hardest parts, made art, brainstormed plot and dialogue with me, fixed typos, called me evil a fair number of times, and cared as much if not more about this story and the characters as I did. Without her this entire thing would have been very different, and absolutely worse off. I'm lucky to have found her as a beta and as a friend, so if you see her pleeeaaase buy her a drink on me. Thank you a million times over, ~~Abby~~ Jenna.
> 
> [ Here's a soundtrack.](https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify%3Auser%3Aakadiene%3Aplaylist%3A14fOjRcJAlGXdwO1Qz5sBs) The title is from the song [Strange Lover Is A Coalmine](https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiqyPup6rvTAhXSKVAKHT2VApcQyCkIJjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9shEjxZYR34&usg=AFQjCNG89Sy6pmE5dksORP6Q3Nrgok3aOQ&sig2=rTnUuHGoPkiR__yj_vMrzw) written by Ed Pickford and interpreted by The Barra MacNeils.

 

 

Above ground the heat was thick and syrupy and pooled on your lower back in salty drips of sweat, and the streets in town were deserted. There were clothes strung up between houses, the Company ones in rows that were near identical. The quiet deafened, quite literally -- that ringing noise unique to late summer drought enveloped all -- and some weather was coming. The almanac and old women’s creaking bones said there was, anyway. It was August 23rd, and a Saturday, and in Springhill in Cumberland County on the mainland of Nova Scotia the heat had forced everyone inside where the oppressiveness of it all was lessened by the shade. Or -- well, if it wasn’t, then it was an illusion no one dared disturb.

Down below things were not much better. In fact they never were.

“He’s new,” Archie Scott the foreman said when Will arrived to the pit head. It was his last night shift for a week, and beginning Monday morning he wouldn’t see much of the sun again for another six days. “Take him down with you.”

The man, a stranger, was in crisp work clothes that had not yet seen a speck of coal dust, and he stood against the dirty lamphouse wall with his hands in his pockets and a light round his hard hat. He seemed to be about Will’s age, maybe, though he didn’t look as old and worn as Will felt at 19.

“Why me?” Will asked. By the wall, the new man didn’t move his gaze.

“He’s renting out a room in your parents’ house,” Archie said. Archie was a first cousin once removed on Will’s mother’s side, and had been working in the pit since his ninth birthday some fifty years ago. He was a rough man who, when he coughed, coughed black as much because of the dust as because of the tobacco he chewed constantly. “And because I goddamn told you so.” He had a bump of chew in his lip now.

“Alright,” Will said, because one day he wanted Archie’s job.

The man followed him up the cart tracks without a word and made noise only when he tripped on a rock and caught himself before he fell. The days were getting shorter and soon it would be dark this time of night, and cold. Will wondered if he was going to have enough to buy a new coat from the company store. His was old and threadbare with holes in the elbows and had been inherited, anyway. He had a hard time still considering it his own. It wasn’t the only thing.

“Name’s Derek Nurse, by the way,” the man said before they joined the others on their way into the mine, the number 2 colliery. They said it was one of the deepest collieries in the world. It certainly felt like it when you were down there.

Will looked at him, and his green eyes that felt deep too. It would be a shame, Will thought, that if he stayed in the mine they might one day go blind from the darkness.

“’M from Sydney whereabouts,” Nurse said. Will had expected that, for him to be from Cape Breton Island, on account of his skin and the faintly Caribbean inflection of his words that sounded otherwise like a true Caper’s. Now that he thought about it, it was probably the reason Archie had told Will to take Nurse down at all. The group Will dug with most often already had Ransom from Guysborough County and Chowder whose parents had a Chinese laundry in Halifax and sometimes the others avoided them. That could have also been because of Jack from down the French Shore who spoke little because his English was so bad, and who had a lazy eye and a nervous stutter from a bad batch of moonshine to boot. Then of course there was Eric Bittle who had been so claustrophobic in the mine shaft at first that he’d fainted on two separate occasions, and still felt sick of it sometimes, and who some called queer because of his size and because he liked to bake with his Ma. But he was the fastest digger on their shift, and could talk smack like the rest of them. They were all nice as anything, anyway, and good miners, so Will liked working with them. You took care of each other in there. There was no other option.

“You got a name?” Nurse asked.

“Poindexter,” Will said. Then they joined the crowd.

“The fuck’s this?” It was Shitty Knight, who never wore his shirt or his hard hat if he could help it and whose father had at one time worked in the company offices, before the war and his return as a crippled, shell-shocked man. He hadn’t left his children very much money when he died, and now Shitty worked in the mine and outside of work mostly just rhapsodized about the union while stoned. “You pick up another stray, or something?”

“Guess so,” Will said, shrugging, just as Nurse said “another?”

“He does that,” said Ransom, who had come up on their other side. Will could see Eric and Jack and Chowder just ahead.

“Didn’t strike me as the type,” Nurse said. He and Ransom shook hands.

“I’m Oluransi,” Ransom said. “Who’s your father?”

“Nurse. From Whitney Pier. I’m Derek.”

“Nah, don’t know him. But I got a good buddy from up your way -- you know an Adam Birkholtz?” Ransom had worked in the Glace Bay mines near Whitney Pier before coming to Springhill after the ‘56 explosion.

“I don’t think so, but I never worked in the Bay collieries.”

“Jesus fucking Murphy,” Shitty said. They had arrived at the open shaft and were waiting their turns to go down in the elevators, which most called the cages. Through the regular throng of men Will could hear a pony whinny. “He really is new.”

Nurse shrugged. “I was in school. My father’s a teacher.”

“Hoo boy! We got ourselves an educated man!” Ransom hollered. Among their group only Shitty had gone further than grade seven -- he’d actually made it as far as eleven, because he’d had some kind of dream to be a lawyer-man before quitting. Will had just turned 12 the last time he’d set foot in a classroom, and still now couldn’t look old Miss Phillips in the eyes.

The sun was nearly down and the heat was still stifling, and Will only just refrained from adding anything extra to the prayer he always sent up before going deep into the crushing belly of the earth.

**……**

Millie had left out on the stove a small amount of stew that was more potatoes and carrots than meat but was thick enough and good anyway, and Will ate it cold straight from the pot, because Millie was asleep and therefore wouldn’t smack him on the shoulder if she saw. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but it would soon, and so would she along with little Nancy. He’d sleep for a couple hours before he had to be awake and ready to go to mass. Sometimes when Jack was feeling up to it he’d pick them up in his old beat-up pickup, and Millie and the baby would sit in front with Jack while Will clambered into the box with Shitty and whomever else. But that was happening less and less now, on account of Jack’s nervousness and alcoholism, so usually they walked. It wasn’t that far, anyway.

Will was 13 when he first went down the pit, and his first job was to drive a pony up and down the shaft. He’d been listening to men talk of the mine since he could remember -- sometimes it felt that was the only language anyone around knew how to speak -- so he thought he knew everything there was to know. As most 13-year-olds do. His father had loved the mine, or at least it seemed so. Will thought he would too. He’d been excited to start working, and angry at the laws that made it so he couldn’t start earlier.

The pony’s name had been Angus, which at the time he’d thought very funny because Will’s father was John Angus. But the horse was old for a pit pony, and blind of course, and small -- just ten hands tall, because he needed to fit in the smallest sections of the mine. He was a good horse, strong, but he’d died a few months later while Will was home in bed. Then there’d been another pony, and then another, and then he couldn’t remember their names anymore. Maybe he’d never tried to learn them at all. But he did learn a lot more down there -- how to laugh and swear and sweat and what it meant to have hundreds of brothers to look after and who looked after you.

So sometimes Will loved the mine too, like his father had, and like Jack loved the drink and Millie had loved her husband, Will’s brother Ashley, lost in the big explosion nearly two years ago. But in the end, it didn’t matter whether or not he loved it or despised it or lived in fear of it. Because he would always go back.

As he undressed and climbed into bed, outside the sky was lightening to the strange dirty pink glow that signalled the coming storm, and it began to rain.

**……**

“Heard some talk about you,” Nurse said after mass. He’d stood in the back with Ransom and Shitty the whole time. Will and Millie and Nancy had arrived soaked and sore minutes before mass started -- but of course their spot had been saved by tradition and was empty when they got there. Poindexters had sat in that row for decades. Will had only ever sat elsewhere during the funerals.

Millie had Nancy and was talking to Father MacLeod over by the doors, and Nurse jerked his head toward them.

Of course there were rumours. People had always talked about Camilla Collins, who’d gotten married late at 22, while the other girls her age already had babies at their breasts and wedding bands on their fingers. Then when she didn’t get pregnant until 24, well. It didn’t matter that Will was 17 then, because Nancy was born with hair as red as her uncle’s, and Ashley and Millie were both blond. Nancy had been conceived only a couple short weeks before the November explosion and born later than expected. Some did the math. When Ashley died and Will was saved from the pit, Millie asked him to help her, move away from home and his mother and into their half of the company double-bungalow. His, now, officially. And so too some people thought Nancy was his.

“I’m sure you did,” Will said. He didn’t bother with anything else anymore. People would believe what they wanted to believe.

Nurse just smiled like he was laughing at a joke only he knew.

After Will had moved down the hill and a few streets over to Millie and Ashley’s, his mother had put their home up for rent for boarders, asked Archie Scott to be landlord, and moved to Halifax to be with Will’s sister Malvina and his sister’s husband who worked in the shipyard, and their four children. Which was why Nurse now lived in the house Will had grown up in. Maybe even in the room he used to share with Ashley.

“You know,” Nurse said, “all my life I heard people talk about the collieries and I thought I knew what it would be like. But I guess hearing about it and studying it are different than living it.”

Nurse had been good, last night. Clumsy -- he’d nearly hit Chowder over the head with his shovel at one point -- but good.

Will kept his eyes on Nancy, who was tugging her mother’s skirt. People bustled around in their nice clothes, talking and laughing and pulling their shawls over their hair in an attempt to shield it from the rain.

“It’s fascinating,” said Nurse.

Will turned his gaze on Nurse. Clean-shaven, smooth-skinned, well-dressed, as tall and broad-shouldered as Will but smaller everywhere else. Someone who’d spent his life in a classroom, and Will, well, he resented it.

“Real fucking fascinating,” he said. Nurse’s eyes widened. “Until you get your first paycheque.”

“Then what?”

Nearby thunder clapped.

“Then you realize you’re one of us now.”

**……**

On wednesday, Eric Bittle pointed his headlamp at Nurse a few hours into work, frowning. As always it was hot as hell, which was a more fitting analogy than anyone who’d never been below ground knew, and sweat dripped black and thick like tar down Eric’s neck.

“How come you don’t got no lunch today?” he said. “You know something the rest of us don’t?”

No one had noticed. Actually Will had been trying not to notice a great deal of things about Nurse.

Nurse shrugged and stuck his pick into the hard sandstone rock face.

“I’ll survive, b’ys,” he said.

“Holy fucking Jesus, you ain’t got paid yet, right?” Shitty said. “D’you even got food? Shit, you should have told us.”

“I told you, I’m alright. I got food at home.”

Eric rolled his eyes. “You’re lucky I packed a bit extra today.”

“Well,” Nurse said, his teeth white in the light against the black dust on his skin, “a little pie wouldn’t go amiss.”

“You know we’re still getting paid just as much now in 1958 as colliers were during the twenties? The fucking twenties!” Shitty said, which distracted Eric enough that the subject was dropped. Nurse kept digging and throwing back shovel after shovel of coal into the carts and didn’t slow down until lunch when Eric offered him a piece of blueberry pie and a couple carrots, and Jack gave him half a peanut butter sandwich.

When the shift came up on top at the end of the day and they began trudging home, passing the other miners solemn on the way in, it was Ransom who said something. Ransom was as tall as Will and snorted when he laughed and had glittering black eyes, and made Springhill fathers mad when their girls danced with him at parties. It never stopped them. His mother was a nurse, and he was the oldest of eight, so she’d taught him some of her trade, which came in handy. A year ago, before Ransom had fully settled into Springhill, when Eric had gotten caught unawares by some older and bigger men behind the post office, Ransom had found him and fixed him up before sending him home to his Ma. Eric had baked him a blackberry pie in thanks and so Will had approached him the next day before going down the tracks. He’d been digging with them ever since.

“Look,” he said to Will. He pointed to Nurse, who was carrying his metal lunch box close to his body, walking apart from Eric and Shitty still ranting and raving.

Will frowned. “Why’s he --”

“He had it this morning too.”

They had slowed down to talk and others walked by, and Ransom pointed his chin toward a trio of men before them. They were covered in dust black as night but of course Will recognized them. The men who’d hurt Eric, and who Will had at one time played with as children, though they were older. They had been Ashley’s friends. As Will watched, near them Nurse tripped over a track, clutching the lunch box with a tight grip, and the men laughed.

“I don’t get it,” Will said.

“No,” said Ransom, “I guess you don’t.”

**……**

Millie was darning socks and the elbows of some cardigans on the step outside when Will walked up to the house with Oliver, the man who lived in the other side. The sun was going down quickly now that it was nearly September, and Nancy was playing with Oliver’s oldest boy in the grass before her. In the summer when it was hot Millie filled the tin tub with water and set it out behind the house for Will to wash in. Last winter she just put down ragged sheets on the floor of the porch and made him do it there, just as he walked in.

Either way, he never felt like he could get clean enough. No matter how hard he scrubbed he felt dirty, and the black under his fingernails was permanent. Always the dust was held deep in his skin and settled heavy in his lungs. Soon he thought his entire body would be made of coal.

Nancy’s curly red head jerked up at their approach and frowned, looking from one man to the other in confusion, then ran to Millie to hide her face in her mother’s neck. Millie just laughed.

“That one,” she said, pointing to Will, who was indeed covered head to toe in black dust. Nancy twisted to squint at them then turned and burrowed closer.

“Don’t blame you, though,” Oliver said. “He’s a scary man.”

“Takes one to know one,” Will said. He elbowed Oliver in the waist.

“Hullo Daddy,” Oliver’s boy said, unbothered. He was older than Nancy and starting school in a week, and Oliver talked about him constantly. “Mommy says don’t even think about putting one foot in the house before you’re clean as whistles.”

“Same to you, William Jacob,” Millie said, smiling. “Not one foot.”

Will put Nancy to bed that night by the light of the kerosene lamp while Millie listened to a programme on the radio set in the kitchen, canning some vegetables from their garden for the winter. He heard her laughing to herself as Nancy yawned against his shoulder.

There were days when all Millie did was laugh. The first time he’d heard it a month after he moved in, it had startled him so much he’d dropped a mug, which shattered. Of course there were other days -- weeks, even -- where she didn’t so much as smile, and then sometimes her mother came and helped with Nancy and the house, but those times were rare now. He much preferred the laughter.

“You gonna be good for your ma tomorrow?” Will asked. He set Nancy down in her crib in the room she shared with her mother with a blanket and a raggedy old doll that had been Will’s sister’s, and she shrugged with her thumb in her mouth. He pulled it out with a gentle tug.

“No,” she said, and giggled. That was why he’d asked -- everything was _no_ lately. Millie had said she’d even refused her turnips at supper, which she usually loved.

“At least try to be, please,” he said. He bent over to kiss her on the forehead. “Okay, goodnight now.”

“No-o-o-o,” she said, dragging it out through another yawn.

“Nancy.”

The lamp flickered on her face, round and freckled. “Goodnight, Daddy,” she said. Then she closed her eyes.

“Everything alright in here?” Millie said, appearing in the doorway, arms crossed over her apron splattered pink from beet juice.

When Nancy had been born he had been equal parts relieved and worried, and that squirming feeling had stayed and only grew as she did, a twist deep in his stomach that never quite went away. She wouldn’t go down in the pit, at least. Hopefully, she’d finish school, which is what everyone wanted for their little ones -- not just Oliver for his son. But she’d never known her father and never would, and he still didn’t know what Millie thought of that. He was afraid to ask. There were many questions to which he didn’t dare give much attention, actually. Other feelings in his gut, all unpleasant.

“She’s asleep,” he said. “And I think I’ll head off to bed too.”

“Alright,” Millie said. She patted his arm as he walked by.

Sometimes, he thought, it was just as hard being the wife or sister or mother or in-law of a miner as it was to be a miner. He also thought that maybe one day the feelings in his stomach would spill over, and then he didn’t know what he would do.

**……**

Ransom and Jack and Chowder lived in a lodging house on the west side of town, and it took them twenty minutes to walk to the pit yard in fair weather. Rarely did they take Jack’s truck down because he preferred to keep the money spent on gas for other things, and no one else could afford to supplement him. Will had grown up about the same length away on the other side, in the north east, but lived closer now. It was a relief in the winter, being closer, when the road down the Poindexter hill was icy and treacherous beneath the buildup of snow, and it took sometimes twice as long to make it to the colliery than was normal.

Will got to the mine on Thursday with Oliver and Shitty seconds before the truck pulled up. Jack stopped the engine and out of the box climbed Ransom, Chowder, and Nurse, who swung his lunch box down as he jumped, and who was laughing.

“What the fuck,” Shitty said, “is the special occasion?”

Chowder’s accent was strong and he spent more time laughing than talking but over the years Will and especially Eric had learned to understand him when he did speak. “Too tired to walk,” he said.

They left it at that.

**……**

“She’s _yours_?” Nurse was saying when Will walked up to where his group of men were standing outside the barn, sharing a pack of darts. Millie, dressed in last year’s yellow Easter dress and her hair curled just so, unhooked her arm from his and held out her hand, two fingers pointed upward, and Shitty scrambled to place a cigarette between them. He bent down to light it as she winked at Ransom agape.

Nurse had in his arms Jack’s fiddle, and was stroking her bow with reverence. She was old, maybe older than Jack himself, and a rich red, gleaming like he’d polished her earlier today. From outside they could hear someone was playing already but it didn’t sound nearly as good as Will knew Jack would.

“Yeah,” Jack said, and frowned. His left eye was permanently cast down but so often you couldn’t even tell it was lazy because he kept his gaze on his shoes. Today they were as shiny as his fiddle, which meant he would dance later, some of those Acadian steps he said everyone knew down his way. The only time Jack was ever steady, Will thought, was when he was digging, playing (fiddle of course and also hockey, which they played in the winter on ponds and in the old rink, on a team with other miners in the town league), and dancing.

“Nurse, you sure you should be carrying that beauty?” Eric said.

“I seen you trip over nothing but a speck of coal dust yesterday,” said Ransom.

“Got no trust in me. I see how it is,” Nurse said, but he gave Jack the fiddle back anyway, then focused his eyes on Will, as if he was just noticing him. He stared. In the fading light it felt like burning, like the smoke stacks rising perpetually dark and hot in the sky over near the pits, and Will could barely stand it.

“Well,” Millie said, flicking her cigarette down and crushing it into the dewy grass with her heel, “what do I gotta do to get a drink around here?” Inside the barn as always at such parties there was something of a bar set up where you could get bottle of Keith’s for a quarter before you went to dance.

“I don’t know. Where’s your ankle-biter?” Ransom asked. He pushed the sleeves of his shirt up and crossed his arms so the fabric pulled tight, which made Eric snort.

“My ma’s. And she’s got a name,” Millie said. Like Eric she seemed unimpressed.

“It’s, uh, Nancy,” said Jack, “right?”

“Right.” She smiled and put her hand on Jack’s arm holding the fiddle. “You wanna buy me a drink, big boy?”

Ransom looked indignant, Eric amused and Jack helpless as Millie all but dragged him into the barn. Shitty threw his own dart onto the ground and followed them in.

“That’ll teach you to remember girls’ names,” Eric said.

“At least I got girls to remember, huh,” Ransom said.

“I got a girl!”

“First we’ve heard of her,” Will said. Nurse blinked at him, then smiled wide, like he’d forgotten Will could talk. More than anything Will wanted to make that smile go away. It felt somehow hateful, and mocking. Burning, again.

“Maybe ‘cause I don’t kiss and tell like some I could mention,” Eric said. He looked at Ransom, who didn’t seem bothered at all, only winked and snapped his suspenders.

“Sure you don’t. But speaking of kissing, I’m going to go in and see if I can do some,” he said. “Come on, Nurse. Gotta show you how it’s done in these parts.”

“I think necking is the same in most places,” Nurse said as he was led away.

“Well I don’t know how you Islanders do it!”

The amount of people filing into the barn, big and old and faded red, was steady, and the laughter inside was getting louder, and there were hands clapping to the music, bottles clinking, boots stomping. Will slapped a mosquito away from his arm and sighed. He was tired, but Millie had wanted to go out for the first time in months, and of course Shitty and Ransom would never have let him say no to a party.

“Those boys,” Eric said, shaking his head. There was fondness and maybe something else in his voice. Brittle-like.

For a second they stood in silence. Eric would be playing the piano for Jack later, probably, something they had begun last year after discovering their musical compatibility by accident at a kitchen party at Archie Scott’s, and his shirt was Sunday-starched and stiff.

“You really got a girl?” Will said.

“Uh huh,” Eric said. “You know Esther Shapiro?”

“The one with the glass eye?”

“She’s sweet,” Eric said. “And her parents have the bakery, you know. After that fire last year downtown they hired on my father to rebuild it and since then Mrs. Shapiro gets on real good with Ma. So.”

“You’re gonna marry a girl because her parents own a bakery?”

“Oh, shut up,” Eric said, and swatted Will on the arm just where the mosquito had left a welt. Possibly on purpose. “I just took her out for a couple dates so far. We’re seeing how it goes. Anyway, that’s more than _you_ can say, if I’m not mistaken.”

Now he sounded defiant, and Will raised his hands, calloused and blackened. “Whoa, alright. I just can’t believe you want to leave us while you go bake some bread above ground.”

Eric paused. In the dying light the scar that went from his lip to his chin, normally white and raised and bumpy-looking, the one from that time behind the post office, was almost invisible.

“Wouldn’t you, if you were me?” he said after a moment.

It was a question like many others Will had never asked himself, maybe for fear of what his answer would be. And there was no room or usefulness for fear in his head or in the mine shaft.

“Don’t matter what I want,” Will said. It was as close to the truth as he could get.

**……**

Two things became very obvious very quickly as soon as the party began in earnest.

The first was that Derek Nurse, for all he bragged about legendary Cape Breton parties and dancing and moonshine, could not dance. His clumsiness, which he still denied despite a small mountain of evidence and perpetual bruises pointing to its existence, transferred over to the dancefloor as easily as Millie fell back into flirting and performing her favourite party trick, which was not paying for a single drink all night. Derek Nurse had two left feet, and in wrong-sized shoes to boot, and he didn’t seem at all bothered by it. In fact he seemed bothered by nothing. He did the square sets with the rest, though he was half a beat off at all times, and danced with whoever he could snag by the arm, and they all had a look of equal bewilderment and delight when he did.

He danced with Millie and Esther Shapiro and he danced with Shitty and Chowder and Ransom, and any others he could get. He was awful, universally, objectively, unequivocally, and yet his laughter was loud and ringing. Up on stage even Jack smiled when Nurse passed in front of him do-si-do-ing, and Eric behind the piano was flushed and happy. He kept his eyes on Jack instead of the keys but played flawlessly anyway, and Will watched it all from the corner of the barn, sat atop a bale of hay with a warm Keith’s in his hand and his cap in his other, spinning it around on his index to the beat.

No, Derek Nurse could not dance, but that may have also been a side-effect of the second thing Will noticed, which was that Derek Nurse could not hold his liquor. And yet in the face of such unadulterated happiness Will found it difficult to hate him for this, as he had hated everything else about him, and just laughed to himself when Nurse went up to the bar for the seventh time to ask for a beer, only to shrug and turn back to the dancefloor when the man behind it told him no.

“Come on, you wet rag,” Nurse said the third time he caught Will staring, out of breath but still tapping his feet, “show me what you got!” He held out a beckoning hand, most likely overwarm and sweaty, but Will couldn’t know for sure because he didn’t take it.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m good right here.”

“Getting pieces of hay stuck up your arse?”

Will took a swig of his beer. “Don’t you worry about my arse, thank you.”

Over on stage (which was really just a few wooden boxes pressed together unevenly), Jack set his fiddle down and Eric stepped away from the piano with one last wave. Esther Shapiro was waiting for him with a beer and Millie with one for Jack. He probably didn’t need another.

Nurse hopped up onto the bale, sloshing some of his own drink onto his lap.

“I’ll worry about your arse if I please,” he said. He took the cap from Will’s finger mid-spin and pressed it on his own curls. It barely fit. “Anyway, aren’t you lonely over here?”

“Ain’t,” said Will.

“Don’t like dancing?” Nurse asked, then raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Or do you just prefer to watch?”

“Just don’t fancy going to work in the morning feeling sore to start.”

“Oh, I know. I bet you’re terrible.”

“Can’t be near as bad as you,” Will said. Nurse laughed, and Will felt that rush again. The resentment. Burning. Just then Shitty appeared, red-faced and redder-eyed, and leaned his sharp elbows on Will’s legs.

“Billy. Will. William. Billiam?” Shitty said. He smiled, lazy and slow, up at them both. Behind him the barn was emptying, couples arm in arm, groups of friends with their heads bent together, Ransom talking with one of the Stellarton girls and laughing. Millie had Jack’s fiddle and bow in one hand and his hand in her other, and his one good eye was wide with what Will suspected was nervousness. Eric was at the door, swatting away moths and mosquitos with Chowder leaning against him, both drunk. And Esther Shapiro wasn’t anywhere Will could see. He brought his focus back to Shitty, who was now twirling his moustache with a single-minded concentration he usually reserved for rolling joints or cigarettes behind the lamphouse at the pit, and waved his fingers in his face.

“Shitty?” Will said. Shitty jumped up.

“Oh,” he said. “You’ve been elected to bring Nurse home. Democratically and everything.”

“Hey! I can bring myself home!” Nurse said, spitting a little onto Will’s face, who said at the same time, “what? No. How come?”

“Well, see, I’ve got strict orders from Mother Bittle to bring Eric back in one piece, Chowder’s liable to get lost like he did last time and God knows I don’t want to go looking through the ditches for him tomorrow, and I think Jack wants to say goodnight to Millie, if you know what I mean.”

In fact Jack just looked like he wanted a drink. Shitty waggled his eyebrows and his moustache simultaneously, which would be impressive, maybe, if it wasn’t Shitty.

“You meddling fucker,” Will said.

Shitty nodded. “Some of the last words my father ever spoke to me, may his soul rest in peace. Now, best get going soon. That Poindexter hill don’t climb itself, you know.”

And then he was gone. Nurse leaned on Will as they navigated through the emptying barn to get outside, and then they were out on the road, and then Nurse was pointing up at the stars with his not-yet empty bottle, humming the slow start of a tune Jack had played earlier. It was past midnight and they needed to be up in a few hours. Will wondered if it was odd to ask to sleep on the same sofa on which he used to spend Christmas morning huddled with his family.

“You got a girl?” Nurse asked eventually, after Will had pushed him away to wrap his arms around himself to fight off the mid-September chill.

“No,” Will said. “Got no time for a girl. Just Millie and Nancy.”

“Oh.” Nurse threw his beer bottle into the ditch and it made no sound when it landed. They were reaching the end of the long road to the barn and turning onto the main road now, where the houses lining it were all dark and sleeping. “You know, you never asked.”

“Asked what.”

“What it was I heard about you,” Nurse said. “You’re an interesting man, William Poindexter.”

“Stop fucking saying that,” Will said. God, he hated him so deeply. As deep as the black black pit, unending as the night.

At his side, Nurse lit a cigarette. He knew by now that Will didn’t smoke them, didn’t have even the few dimes to spare a week for them, and as such didn’t even offer him any. The smell was comforting, though, like Will’s father and like Ashley who had begun smoking as soon as he was old enough to go down into the pit at 13, as was the scent of wet grass and the slightly muddy road beneath their feet. He breathed it all in.

“D’you like it here?” Nurse said.

Their boots crunched and squelched with each further step on the road, which soon would begin its familiar slope up the hill, and there was the sound of crickets surrounding them.

Of course, Will thought, of course I do. I’ve been to Halifax and it isn’t for me. I’ve never known anything but this. I’ve never wanted to know anything else.

“Sure,” is what he said.

“I do,” Nurse said, then he whooped and jumped and clicked his heels. “After tonight I think I do.”

“Be quiet, people are sleeping,” Will hissed, but then, as sure as he had been of it minutes before, the hate now felt distant again. It was like he’d swung his pick axe to hit the rock face and instead found nothing but absence of something, a gaping hole, unmineable. It was like -- he had heard a story once of a gypsum mine up on Cape Breton Island, further north than where Nurse had grown. A quarry nestled between two mountains blasted so deep that it had one day hit a spring of clear, cold water. The men digging in it had just enough time to get out but the stories said that there were things left behind, like carts and shovels and horses and of course gypsum. The hole had filled with water until it was possible to swim in it, and now no one knew how far down it went. When you tread the surface they said you couldn’t see the tips of your toes because of how deep it was, because of how the light couldn’t reach the bottom of the pool. Because of the absence of something.

I’ve never wanted anything but this. I’ve never wanted anything else.

“How many brothers and sisters you got?” Nurse asked, softer now. He walked so close his elbow tapped Will’s when he put it in his pocket. “It isn’t a very big house.”

“It’s decent-sized,” Will said. “For me and my sister and my brother. And my parents too.”

“Small family. You the youngest?”

Will nodded, but in the night clouding over he didn’t think Nurse saw it, so he said, “yeah.” Then, “you?”

“Second oldest,” Nurse said, “of five. Diane, the youngest, she just turned six before I left. I miss them.”

“You’ve only been here three weeks,” Will said.

They began to climb the hill.

**……**

The house was built by Will’s father and friends and neighbours some thirty years before, and it was square and tall and maybe not very big, but it had a good foundation and a solid, strong elm in the front yard. In early summer miniature strawberries the size of the tip of Will’s little finger grew along the dirt road leading to it. At one time there had been a long garden in the back, and though the chicken coop out behind was still there, it was empty and its roof was bowing from neglect and a hard winter. The white paint on the house was peeling and Archie had mentioned at the start of the summer that he might hire Will on to redo it in the fall, but so far had not asked again.

Beside him Nurse was talking about his home on the island -- “I got a room alone, well, it was more like a closet, because I’m the only boy, so that was nice but Diane liked to come and sleep with me when she had nightmares” -- and his eyes were clearer and his steps steadier in the moonlight now since his drunk was wearing off.

“You mind if I sleep on the sofa here?” Will said. He was staring at the elm tree from which he had once fallen and broken his wrist. For a moment he wanted to reach out and touch it, assure himself it was still the same one, as if he could tell it from any other elm tree in Springhill simply by texture. Like a ghost he heard Malvina’s screech as he fell and his ma’s gasp and like something more substantial he heard Ashley’s laughter and his father’s sharp _goddamn_.

“Your house,” Nurse said, shrugging. “It’s just me and that -- what’s his name -- something Miller?”

“Walter?” They walked up the path to the screen door, which would also have to be taken down soon before the fall.

“Must be. He’s on the other shift so I’ve only spoken to him a few times.”

The house looked the same on the inside, too.

“What, uh, what room you in?” he asked as he took his boots off and left them at the door.

“Upstairs on the right.”

Like Will had suspected. He peered into the living room where he knew the stairs were, though he couldn’t see them in the dark.

“Oh,” he said. “I’ll just -- blankets in the closet by the bathroom?”

“You wanna come see? I’d want to,” Nurse said. “It’s yours, right? Got your initials on the window sill.” He was already walking across the room making noise but it didn’t matter since Walter was at the mine, and was clearly expecting Will to follow. Which he did, of course, though maybe with some kind of morbid fascination. He hadn’t been up there since a few weeks after Ashley’s funeral -- one of many, that month, so many they’d all felt like a blur of woody, peppery incense and lit votives and kneeling for prayers.

“I don’t think Miller likes me much,” Nurse said. The stairs were steep and narrow and wood worn down from use.

“How come,” Will said. “You break something of his or something?”

“Actually I sat on one of his pipes last week and broke the tip clean off but he doesn’t know that yet so don’t tell him,” Nurse said. They’d reached the top and he was pushing open the door, which had stood crooked since that time Will and Ashley had been wrestling and Will, going through puberty and not knowing his strength, had slammed Ashley into it, nearly unhinging it. “No, he doesn’t like my typewriter. Says it keeps him up sometimes. About the only thing he’s said since I’ve been here.”

“Your typewriter,” Will said, the words coming slow and disbelieving. Which was silly because Nurse had flicked on the light and there it was, on a desk where Will’s bed had once been but which was most likely now relegated to the shed or whichever room was unused at the moment. It was beige and sleek and new with plastic keys and looked almost jarringly out of place, until Will noticed the pile of books piled next to the desk on the floor in a haphazard tower and pieces of paper and pens and notebooks strewn on the bed.

“Yeah, but I don’t believe him. It’s a Silent Super.”

“Why,” Will said. “Why do you have a typewriter?”

God, he needed to fucking sleep. He couldn’t go to work without any fucking sleep. But he felt good, or better, now, and a little giddy. A bit like the child he had been in his old bedroom in the house that had raised him.

Nurse smiled, with that same glee. “I’m a writer,” he said. “Or, I want to be. I got published once, under a, under a different name you know. It was a poem I wrote about -- can you read?”

Blinking, Will sat down on the bed, pushing a notebook away to do it. “Uh. Not that well,” he said.

“Alright. Well, it was about the steel workers back home, you know, at the steel plant? From the point of view of the steel.”

“Oh,” Will said. “What was -- what was your other name?”

Nurse sat next to Will with a piece of paper in his hands, and he was grinning so widely Will couldn’t help but smile back. “Promise not to tell anyone?”

“Why’s it a secret?” Will asked. “Is it a girl’s name?” He laughed a little, and nudged Nurse’s rib with his elbow, and Nurse looked delighted.

“No, but I’m writing about the mine now and I don’t want anyone to find out yet.”

“The mine?” he said. “What about the mine?”

“Oh,” Nurse said, leaning back and feeling around the bed for something then coming back with a stack of papers held together with a paperclip. “It’s not going to be a poem this time, but more of an article. Or, an essay, I guess. About -- about the people and the town and the work and the conditions and the pay.”

Nurse was still smiling, his teeth white against his skin, smooth and unmarked by scars or roughness.

“What do you mean?” Will said. “Why would you do that?”

“Well, to show how it really is. Maybe if it gets enough attention the working conditions could improve, if the Company saw it. There’s a publishing house in New York City that I’ve been writing to and --”

“What’s wrong with the mine?” Will stood, one second feeling good and the next claustrophobic in the small room, and it felt like his body, a body shaped by the deepest colliery in the world, hewn by the rock face two miles deep into the earth, was betraying him.

“Will,” Nurse said. His eyes were wide and his eyelashes long when he looked up at Will. “Two years ago forty men died in an explosion in the number four mine. And Shitty says --”

“You weren’t there,” Will said. “You weren’t fucking there.”

Nurse looked down to the page filled with type which Will wouldn’t want to read now even if he had the patience to try.

“I know, Will, but still not _safe_. It’s not right.”

“ _You_ got no right,” Will said, feeling like he no longer fit in his skin and in this room and in this house. He couldn’t look Nurse in the eyes anymore, not those fucking green eyes. “No fucking right to come here, and -- did you write about me? God. You don’t know us. These are good people.”

“I know,” Nurse said. “I know you’re good people.”

“You think you can just -- three weeks, Nurse, what can you know from three weeks?”

“Christ, Will,” Nurse said, throwing down the paper on the bed and standing to face him. Funny how Will had never noticed before that they were exactly the same height. “I know enough that I see things could change around here. You don’t think it’s ridiculous that we’re digging coal all day and all night and most don’t even got enough to heat their homes?”

“God, you’re so full of shit. You never had to work a day in your life until three weeks ago.”

“That’s not the point. The point is -- the point is, don’t you want to make it better?” Nurse threw his hands in the air and Will couldn’t fucking look at him. He stared at the window sill instead.

“You’re going to send this to New York or wherever, then up and leave, and we’re the ones who are going to suffer for it. Us, not you. It won’t be better. You’re kidding yourself if you think it will.”

“You don’t know that’s true,” Nurse said. He was shaking his head over and over. The door hung crookedly and there were rough scratched letters on the window sill and the bed was as lumpy as it had been the last time he’d sat on it the morning of Ashley’s wake and Will felt so tired, just then. So goddamn tired. Bone-deep and eyelids heavy as coal.

“You ain’t one of us,” he said. “So why do you care?”

The movement of Nurse’s head stopped and he stared straight ahead, and Will felt compelled, somehow, like the moths around the light earlier in the barn, to stare back.

“What does it matter, when you don’t at all?” Nurse said. It was cold, in the room. The window was open and the curtains fluttered. Will crossed his arms.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Will said.

“There’s nothing to know,” Nurse said. He took a step closer. “Because you know what I heard about you, Will? Aside from a few rumours about you sleeping with Camilla --”

“Don’t you fucking dare talk about her like --”

“I heard nothing. You understand that? Not a single fucking thing. In a place like this I can know every day what Oliver O’Meara’s mother had for supper the night before just by asking around but I heard nothing about you. Not a single goddamn thing.”

“Because I mind my own fucking business,” Will said, “unlike you.”

“No. I thought it was because you kept your shit close or something, but now I know it’s because you got no business. You hang around with Chowder and Eric and Ransom but you don’t do shit when they get beat up or when people steal their money. You know what people say about Millie but you don’t ever defend her. You --”

“I said, don’t you goddamn put Millie’s name in your mouth.”

“One of the foremen is your goddamn cousin and you never try to talk to him about better wages or hours or sturdier equipment.”

“It won’t make a difference!” Will shouted. Because they were shouting now, he supposed.

“You don’t know that!” Nurse said, just as loud. Thank God Walter was on shift. “Forty men _died_ , Will! Doesn’t that bother you?”

“It was thirty-nine,” Will said, and turned and went out the door and down the steps and in the dark banged his toe on the sofa which had possibly been moved and put on his boots and left the house and walked by the tree and down the hill until he was running, running to the double-bungalow he shared with his widow sister-in-law and niece, past the houses all in rows with their clothes lines and their gardens and children’s bikes leaned up against them, past the barn where Nurse had danced and the tailor’s shop and the post office and the school and Irene’s clothes store, and the barber’s and Archie Scott’s house and the fire hall and all the shops along Main Street and still more houses, more neighbours.

It was still dark but there was grey on the horizon when he got to his house. He willed himself to take deeper breaths, closing his eyes, and it felt like all he could hear was his heartbeat, though he knew the birds were waking up and soon the men would be coming back from the pit in time for the other shift to head out. When finally he thought he could go in without waking up Nancy in an instant he did so, and at the door tripped on a pair of men’s boots that weren’t his.

**……**

There were days in the mine where it felt like the rock was closing in around you and so was your throat within you. Those days the heat was unbearable, and all food tasted like sawdust, and every noise made you jump. When the ponies were restless, the earth felt like it was breathing, and you spoke louder as if to scare away the phantoms and ignore that though you couldn’t see it anymore there was blood on the cart tracks.

And then there were days like this -- with laughter, and gossip, and talking about hockey and preparations for the fall, and singing dirty ditties, and teasing the men who came to work with their necks bruised up from the night at the barn. Certainly some of them were still drunk or else were fighting off headaches or exhaustion like Will was, but it didn’t matter much since there were no bosses, no foremen, and no wives down in the pit, only supervisors who couldn’t be arsed to care.

Somehow, after his quarrel with Nurse a few hours ago, Will had thought everything would have changed, and -- well, maybe some things did. Nurse didn’t smile at him though he did with the others, and that Will noticed was cause to frown. Only not for long, because Shitty and Ransom had convinced Jack to teach them his Acadian swear words, which they did whenever it seemed like Jack was in a good enough mood to indulge them. Then they asked Chowder to share some of his, and so soon the entire line of men was yelling out things in between swings of their axes and shovels which were probably nonsense, judging by the way Chowder was laughing and Jack was shaking his head. A scene comforting in its familiarity.

The shift came up to a sky already darkening, and the men lit their cigarettes as soon as they were clear of the shaft like they always did. There were young boys playing near the tracks, hollering and laughing in the calm of the evening before they had to run on home for bed. Will walked on and thought, some things won’t ever change. Some things don’t have to.

Jack said, after falling into step beside Will and walking for a moment, “big wind coming soon.”

Will frowned. The radio hadn’t said anything about that. “How d’you know.”

“I just,” Jack said around his dart. Covered in coal dust as he was, his eyes were stark and blue against the black. “I. You know.” He gestured to the children playing and some of the men in front of them -- Ransom and Shitty were singing Elvis and Chowder was playing keep-away with Eric’s lunch, Nurse laughing at them all -- as if that would explain anything. Will could hear the laughter above the noise.

“You can tell?”

“Yeah.”

Often he forgot that Jack had not grown a man of the earth but instead of the ocean, had been born with the highest tides in the world and had spent most of his years on wharves instead of in mines. Shitty had found out early on that Jack’s father was a fish-buyer from New York who had moved to the Nova Scotian French shore before the first war, and who had met his mother, a Yank from Boston, on a business trip, which explained Jack’s last name, his truck, and the years-old callouses on his hands, but not really the rest -- not the booze nor the bad English nor the mining. But sometimes, Will supposed, sometimes a reason wasn’t necessary.

“When?” he asked.

Jack just shrugged then clapped Will on the back and headed down the road to the lodge.

**……**

Archie found Will the next day.

“Need you to start painting that house before winter,” said Archie. “I left some gallons of paint in the chicken coop.”

They were at the post office, and the woman at the desk who was named Mary-Ethel Campbell looked annoyed because it was just about closing time and also because he was still in his work clothes and work dust. But Will sent what money he could to his mother and sister in Halifax once a month, and today he had gotten paid, so that’s what he was doing. He was late because he’d stopped at the butcher’s too, on the way home from the pit, for some cuts of meat Millie could stew. Later he would call his mother on the telephone to tell her some money was coming, and to talk to Malvina if she wasn’t too busy with the kids. Her youngest, colicky John Ashley, was probably teething by now.

“Alright,” Will said. “I’ll start Sunday.”

**……**

It was Walter Miller, not Nurse, who Will saw first when he got to the top of the hill. Walter was on the porch in the rocking chair, the old one painted white which had sat in the corner of the living room with a yellow afghan thrown over it for as long as WIll could remember, and he was smoking from a pipe. It smelled sweet, the tobacco mixed in with the scents of late summer: dirt, grass, lingering incense from mass, and something else which wasn’t really a scent but was crisp in his lungs when he inhaled anyway. Like the coming fall. Already the leaves had begun to turn yellow in some places. Will would be turning 20 soon, in late October, not that he cared so much. But Millie would most likely make some of that boxed spice cake he liked. Or last year Eric had remembered and baked him some raisin pie, so maybe he could mention it in passing. For a second he wondered when Nurse’s birthday was but then Walter spoke so he didn’t dwell on the thought.

“Nice day,” Walter said. A low rumbling voice, like the earth shifting together.

“Sure is,” said Will. He stretched his arms toward the sun.

“How’s your mother,” Walter said.

“She’s real good.”

“Keeping busy?”

“Oh, well. You know. She’s in the city with Malvina.”

Walter nodded and leaned back in the chair.

“Archie wants me to paint the house so I’m going to start off scraping what’s left away,” said Will.

“You’re going to need some scaffolding for that.”

“Well I guess I’ll ask Archie to just rent some from Richard Bittle when I get to that but for now I’ll do what I can reach.”

“Alright. Ladder’s out back. You alone?”

“I -- yeah.”

“Ground is uneven. Get Nurse to watch you.”

As if he hadn’t spent his years before going underground playing above it, around this very house.

“Right. Yeah. Is he --”

Walter grunted and gestured above with his pipe, to indicate that Nurse was upstairs, probably typing away even on such a beautiful day off. But as Will nodded and went inside to get him he heard heavy footfalls coming down the stairs and there was Nurse, his nice Sunday shirt untucked and his suspenders hanging down and his feet bare as if he’d only taken his socks off after mass before starting in on whatever it was he was writing.

“Will?” he said. He was frowning and the sun was streaming in from the window to illuminate his face and sparkling dust particles around him. “What are you doing here?”

“I. I need your help outside.”

Walter disappeared down the hill as soon as they got settled outside, with Will on the ladder and Nurse, still barefoot and now with a book and pen below the elm tree. They didn’t speak. Will scraped paint away, climbed down the ladder, moved it over, climbed back up, and scraped some more. If his shadow grew longer he didn’t notice and the silence, though not intolerable, was still heavy and uncomfortable.

“What are you reading,” Will asked when he reached the stretch of house nearest the tree. His hands were sore from holding the scraper and his arms tired but it wasn’t anything like swinging a pick and shovel all day long in the weighty heat. In fact when he paused to speak he noticed there was a cool breeze picking up, and the sky was greying. He didn’t have his watch on him but thought maybe it was nearing time to eat.

“What?” Nurse said. He looked up from his book, seeming startled.

Will twisted himself around on the ladder and pointed down to the book with his scraper.

“What are you reading,” he repeated.

Nurse smiled, something small.

“It’s -- here, let me read some.”

“Oh God. I regret asking,” Will said. The smile grew.

“Listen,” Nurse said, then stood and cleared his throat. “I’m with you in Rockland, where --”

He didn’t finish his sentence because just then the ladder shifted and Will’s foot slipped, sending him toppling onto the ground from five feet up. Nurse threw his book down and took the few steps to the ladder but Will was already down, twisted because his right shoulder had taken the hit the hardest.

“Christ,” Nurse said. Will felt as if all the air had left his lungs and all he felt was an ache, deep and stinging, from his shoulder. “Christ, fucking -- “ Nurse touched him with a ginger hand and Will opened his eyes to look up at Nurse’s, green and wide with concern. He was framed by the sky getting darker still, and his shirt collar fluttered in the wind. “Can you get up? Oh God. Jesus. Are you --”

“Nurse,” Will said, though it was more of a croak. He closed his eyes again. “Just -- fucking help me up --”

Nurse hooked his hands under Will’s shoulders and heaved upwards, and Will swore from the hurt when he did, until he stood on shaky legs holding his arm to his chest. The ladder had fallen with a clatter against the house when Will did.

“There’s -- ” Nurse began, pointing to Will’s shoulder. “You’re bleeding.”

“I’m -- can you put the ladder and scraper in the coop?” Will breathed in sharply as he pressed his hand to the wound, visible through a rip on his shirt, caused by some rocks that had been hidden in the grass that needed cutting. “I’m going to go clean this.”

“The iodine is -- ”

“In the left kitchen cupboard, I know.”

“No, in the -- the basket on the toilet.”

“Oh.”

Will nodded and limped inside, and when he turned to look again, Nurse was staring back.

**……**

“I’m going to close the shutters,” Nurse said when he walked into the kitchen where Will had taken in the medical supplies and was attempting to bandage his own arm at the table. “It’s getting rough out there.”

“Is it,” Will said. He was trying not to move too much.

“Felt a few raindrops, you know, cold ones, and the wind is picking up something fierce.”

“Came on fast,” Will said. Nurse crossed the kitchen to close the shutters of the window above the sink.

“Real fast,” said Nurse. “I’ll get some beans and Spam going after.”

Will frowned. Somehow his left hand had begun tracing a familiar whorl in the table wood.

“Millie’s expecting me. And there’s the storm.”

“Call her on the telephone at six when the operators are there and tell her to go next door with Nancy. Oliver will get the house locked up.”

Outside something clattered against the house -- a shutter, or the rocking chair most likely.

“The -- ”

“I’ll get it,” Nurse said.

Will closed his eyes for a second, breathed in deeply, then stood. For a second it was like he could feel his blood moving around inside his arm and he had to hold in a gasp, but the feeling went as quickly as it came and the pain receded.

“Alright. I’ll fill the tub in case -- in case the power goes.”

“You don’t have to.”

“And you got some wood, right, to cook with. For the stove.”

“Well, no, we’ve mostly been using gas.”

“So no wood.”

“It’s September, Will. No wood. But we’ll be able to use the stove, I guess.”

At his house he had a stack left over from last winter for such emergencies in the small shed out behind but he couldn’t remember if he’d told Millie, or if Oliver had a similar stock. It wouldn’t be enough to last them the night any but maybe enough to boil some water for some King Cole tea and to put in hot water bottles and heat some rocks to keep underneath their blankets during the night. If it got that bad, of course. If the power went.

“Are the extra blankets still -- ”

“Yeah. Yeah. Closet by the bathroom.”

Another sound, louder and closer this time, resounded. They looked at each other once more then got to work.

**……**

The operator, a woman from Stellarton if Will remembered correctly, sounded annoyed when he called but put him through to their line anyway, and it was Jack who answered. As hard as Jack was to understand in person somehow it was even worse over the telephone but Will was reassured, a little.

“I’m staying the night,” Jack said, maybe. It sounded garbled, which could have been from the wind, or the accent, or some neighbours possibly listening in on the call, or -- well. It could have been the alcohol too.

“Alright. I’m at -- with Nurse.”

“Good,” said Jack. “Good.”

**……**

The power went out just past nine. A loud crack sounded through the wind and Nurse, from the couch where he was reading, looked up and said “the tree.” On the radio Conway Twitty sang “it’s only make believe.”

“Shit,” Will said. He was in the rocking chair, running his fingers over the afghan again and again and again.

Nurse folded over the corner of the page he was reading and tucked the book beneath his thigh.

“Did I ever tell you about that time,” he said, “my father caught me and my sister drinking behind the steel plant?”

“No.”

Nurse sat forward. “Well, here’s the thing…”

**……**

“It won’t get too cold overnight,” Will said, “I don’t think.”

They had brought down Nurse’s mattress and pillows and blankets to the living room because the house was shaking too hard upstairs and Nurse didn’t think he’d be able to get to sleep there. Will didn’t want to try, for other reasons.

He got settled on the sofa while Nurse did the same on the floor, still talking in a soft voice, the kind he used with Eric when he got the spins underground but rarely if ever anywhere else. Maybe with his little sisters, Will thought. He didn’t know why Nurse was using it now.

“How’s your arm,” Nurse said like that. “And the rest of you.”

“The rest of me?”

“You’re tense.”

“What? I ain’t.” Will stared up at the ceiling in the dark. The house creaked and groaned like he imagined might happen in a ship. “Anyway my arm is fine now.”

It was. He’d changed the bandage a few minutes ago while Nurse held up an old bulbous kerosene lamp for light. He could swing it around now and was sure it would be fine for their night shift tomorrow.

“Well if it starts to ache in the night let me know and you can take the mattress.”

He wouldn’t, but it was nice of Nurse to offer.

The couch was an itchy brown thing ordered from an Eaton’s catalogue some years back after his father returned from war from a year away, and his mother had decided that the sofa on which she’d spent so much time with her favourite rosary tangled in work-worn fingers had to go. So this one was old now, and was uncomfortable and lumpy when Will tried to find a good position that would rest too much weight on his arm. He hadn’t spent as much time on it growing up, preferring instead to be outside and to spend his days down the tracks around the mine and in the copse of trees behind the house and playing hockey in the road down the hill with the neighbour kids. But of course there were Christmas mornings and Sunday evenings listening to the radio and the days he was sick and his mother covered him in the yellow blanket and fed him soup and forced a mix of honey, pepper and cloves down his throat while an onion sat on the side table next to him to draw into it the virus.

He wondered if it was storming in Halifax too. He remembered his mother singing to him when he was sick, but not the songs. They hadn’t been sung in the house in a very long time. Not since he’d first gone in the mine. Not even with Nancy or Malvina’s children. The rosary, though, he could remember the colour of each bead in order and the exact texture of them against his fingers, its glint in the early morning light streaming in through the kitchen window every time he and Ashley and his father walked out of the house to go to work.

“Will?”

“Nurse.”

“I’m still writing the essay,” Nurse said.

“Oh.”

“But I decided -- I decided I’d ask the people I want to write about if I could write about them.”

Will closed his eyes.

“Don’t use my name.”

There was a rustle and in the night Will saw the faint outline of Nurse sitting up, looking at him.

“Really?” he asked. “What should I use instead?”

“Well,” Will said, “I’ve always liked -- I think I could have been a Derek.”

There was a beat then Nurse laughed, and Will felt himself smiling, though Nurse certainly couldn’t see it.

“Liar,” Nurse said. “You could not.”

“Maybe not,” said Will. “I might not be clumsy enough.”

He felt one of Nurse’s hands land a smack on his ribs, which was probably not the intended target but in the obscurity the best that could be done. It barely stung.

“Uncalled for,” Nurse said, and it was like Will could hear his smile. “Real nasty.”

“I’m injured. Watch it.”

“So sorry. Forgot how fragile you are.”

Will launched his own hand out and caught Nurse’s shoulder, which started some kind of overly cautious wrestling between the couch and the mattress on the floor with Nurse being extra careful around Will’s bad arm and Will not holding back. There was a moment where Nurse pulled and Will’s breath stopped for a gravity-defying second but then he fell onto the mattress and had the upper hand. Nurse tried to flip them but he had only been working for a month, and Will had years of labour built into his body and threaded through the sinews of his skin, and held him down easily. The shutters rattled against the walls of the house and they too were shaking, but with laughter. It felt like a storm nonetheless.

“Uncle!” Nurse said. “Uncle! Okay!”

Will sat up near the edge of the mattress.

“Weren’t you saying to Eric just the other day that you were getting stronger?” Will said.

“I was going easy on you,” Nurse said, “because I was taught not to hurt the wounded.”

“Uh huh. I don’t believe you.”

And then somehow in one smooth, unforeseen movement Will was on his back, his arms pinned with Nurse hovering above him, crowing in triumph.

“Believe me now?” Nurse said, and Will kissed him.

It lasted barely a second before Will pushed him off and rolled away, which ended with Will’s arse on the floor and his legs up on the mattress a foot away from where Nurse was, both breathing hard, unbalanced and unknowing what to say. He didn’t know -- he couldn’t -- he’d never -- he felt like everything within him had spilled out and here in the dark shut up in this house he’d never be able to force it back inside. And grateful, or something, that he couldn’t see anything, not the remnants of his guts on the floor nor Nurse’s fucking green eyes (and hard jaw and broad shoulders and scratchy beard and tight curls and), because his own eyes had never adjusted to the lack of light in the room. For all he knew the walls were closing in, caving in. There had after all been an explosion.

“Fuck,” Will said through his panting. “I’m -- ”

And then Nurse was there again, tugging him to the mattress, toward him, into him, kissing. Will had never kissed anyone like this.

So maybe not an explosion. In room-and-pillar mining where they dug through the ground and left pillars of rock to support the coal galleries, sometimes these events called bumps happened. They caused the earth to shake and the walls to collapse and the pillars to fall to dust though no one quite knew how. It was something seismic, something bigger than any one person could imagine. The earth would tremble and shake for miles around, they said, and you could feel it from inside even the sturdiest buildings. Will had only ever heard of them -- as far as he knew there had never been a bump in any Springhill mine.

But not an explosion, and maybe not yet a bump -- but Nurse still felt like the only pillar holding him up, supporting him by way of kissing, lips, cracked wonderful lips, and hands, calloused rough pulling tender hands and breath, hot, tobacco-sweet breath -- and a voice.

“Holy, Holy, Holy…”

Neither could bear to stop. Certainly Will didn’t want to. He didn’t think he had ever known anything else but this or even wanted to or possibly imagined.

“Derek,” he said.

There, much later, in an old, rattling house with a rocking chair, and a typewriter, and a battered tree in the front yard, they fell asleep: two men, kiss-bruised, only half undressed, and, like vines, tangled and clinging to each other.

**……**

Will, like most men in Springhill, had long ago become comfortable with the thought that the mine would one day kill him. Either by accident below ground or by sickness above with black lung disease, or stress on the heart, or any other such illness. In fact he’d never really considered another option. It was a part of the life, anyway. You were born, you worked, you died. In an abstract way Will knew there were other things, life events, meant to fit within the categories of birth, work, and death, but it had always been hard to picture any of it happening for him. Eventually, he thought, eventually he’d settle down with a nice girl and maybe be a foreman and get the house on the hill and his mother would possibly come back to live with him and he’d have children and they’d be miners too or else go to school, if they were lucky.

But his fear of death had been dulled, like the pit ponies’ eyesight, with each trip down. The explosion had caused a spike, possibly, and he’d mourned his father and brother’s and the other men’s deaths of course -- was perhaps still in mourning -- but to say death was to say acceptance. There was hardly a choice, in any case. Any miner afraid of death and dying and pain would never get any work done and would lose his job.

In fact, fear as a general concept was not particularly present in Will’s life. There was the quiet, constant concern for Nancy’s well-being, occasional worry for Millie, and his mother and Malvina too, and a healthy distrust of the mine. He knew to look out for the others down there just as they had his back. But fear itself was not useful, and mostly Will didn’t have the energy or luxury of being afraid.

Derek Nurse, and being with him, was wildly fucking terrifying.

It would have been best, Will knew, they both knew, to stop. To forget what happened during the storm and go on as normal. To give into the self-hate and self-doubt and terror bubbling deep in Will’s stomach. This urge was strongest a week after the original incident when he and Millie climbed out of Jack’s truck to go to mass. In the days preceding, he and Nurse had -- well. A hard time keeping their hands off each other, in private. But just then standing in front of the church Will had felt such nausea that even Nancy, who was warm in his arms, had frowned at him, and Millie had asked what was wrong.

And then Nurse came up behind them, clapped Jack on the back and very seriously shook Nancy’s hand, winked at Millie and elbowed Will in the waist, and. Somehow it was harder to give him up than it had been God.

The fear came up in surprising ways.

Avoiding the alley behind the post office, though Nurse said he’d always done that, and being careful of lingering gazes and touches and too-loud laughter and widening smiles lest anyone notice anything at all. They barely looked at each other in public, and Will was cautious in even mentioning Nurse’s name too much. The Poindexter house, with Walter gone most of the time, was the one place that felt isolated enough to do what they pleased. Which they did, and which was mostly exhilarating, but also more frightening than he’d ever thought anything could be.

He noticed, for the first time in the many, many years they’d known each other, how much quieter Eric became the further they went from the mine after their shifts. How he held himself even smaller when the men from their group went away towards home one by one. How he walked closest to Jack and Ransom whenever he could, whenever anyone mentioned baking. How he finally told them all about Esther Shapiro, in a loud sort of voice, and laughed when Shitty congratulated him and asked him about her glass eye.

Words from other men down in the mine he’d previously thought of as teasing, as smack-talk, sounded different now that he was paying attention. Accidents, like pickaxes swinging too close to Nurse’s head, him tripping on someone’s shovel, or some spit landing on Ransom’s boot, no longer seemed so accidental. It became clear why Chowder rarely spoke to anyone but Eric, because just opening his mouth merited derisive snorts and bad imitations. And there were names, and jokes, about Eric and Ransom and Nurse and Chowder, and even Jack because he was a Frenchman, from some. From many. From most, even. Some Will had used before.

And then: he ran into Shitty at the butcher’s one afternoon before their night shift buying more meat than was possibly necessary. Shitty said he not only bought himself some cuts, but some for Ransom and Chowder too, who weren’t welcome in the shop.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nurse said when Will asked if he too had the same arrangement with Shitty. His nose was splattered with white paint because he was helping Will with the house. Up high on the scaffolding Will looked around quickly and kissed him, sweet and slow.

But he was worried. And finally afraid, too. There had to be other things he’d never noticed.

**……**

“You ever,” Will said, “think you’re going to run out of words?”

He was on Nurse’s bed, with his shirt untucked and half his buttons undone, and had a stripe of paint on his jaw put there by Nurse in ambush earlier, drying and stiffening and overall making his face feel funny. He’d have to go back to his house soon because it was already dark and he’d left Millie with a grumpy Nancy and of course he didn’t want to raise suspicions. But for now he felt calm, and content, and warm.

Nurse had rolled away from him a minute earlier and rummaged over the side of his bed for a pencil and a notebook in which he was now writing. In the lamplight he glowed.

“Hm?” he said, though he did not take his eyes away from the page.

“I just reckon,” Will said, pushing himself up on his elbows for clearer to see Nurse, “that one day probably there’ll be no more combinations of words left, that they would all be used up. Then what would you do.”

“I doubt that would happen,” Nurse said. He was still writing and did not look up.

“But what if it did.”

“Then I’d learn a new language.”

“And what if --”

“Then I’d invent a new language.”

“Oh.”

Now Nurse did look at him, and smiled.

“Believe me when I say I’ll always have words. They don’t ever stop in my head.” He tapped his forehead with his pencil.

It had been nearly a month since the storm. Soon they would not be able to slow down the painting any longer and it would be done, and then they would have to find a new excuse for their time spent together. If Nurse wanted to continue -- but Will thought it was likely with the way he was looking at him now. Fond. It made something twist inside. A part of his body that wasn’t yet touched by black dust or the interminable darkness underground.

“Why,” Nurse said. “Do you think one day you’ll run out of coal to dig?”

“That ain’t the -- oh,” Will said, because Nurse had begun laughing and was crawling up the bed to kiss him again.

He felt wild and untamed like the thick black smoke from the stacks at the pit when it was scattered by the wind as soon as it went into the sky. Expansive and sprawling and like a giant, able to capture the whole word with just two hands, hands once worn and hard but somehow softer and made anew when he touched Nurse and held him tight.

“You haven’t used your typewriter in a while,” said Will a few minutes later. Nurse’s chin was digging into his sternum but he couldn’t bear to move him.

“No,” Nurse said, “I prefer to write my poetry by hand.”

“But what about your essay.”

Nurse turned his head so that his curls tickled Will’s jaw and he looked out the window.

“Do you want to read it,” Nurse said. Quiet like a murmur.

“You know I --”

“I’ll read it to you.”

“Why,” Will said.

“I want your opinion on some things before,” he finally said, “before I give it to them.”

“What?” Will said. “What do you mean?”

Against Will’s skin Nurse spoke. “There are some parts I haven’t typed up yet because I have a few questions to ask you so I was hoping you’d let me read it to you because. The, the publishing house wants it by the seventh, the seventh of November.”

“That’s not so far away.”

“It’s the twenty-first today. So I suppose not.”

Will frowned and pushed Nurse away so he could sit up and begin buttoning his shirt. It was getting late. He scratched at the paint on his chin but it barely came off as his nails were too short -- and anyway it was good evidence that they had in fact been painting.

“Does that mean that aside from that you’re done?”

“I -- yes.”

“And then you send it off?”

Nurse was silent for so long Will thought perhaps he’d fallen asleep or else had actually run out of words so soon after he said he wouldn’t.

“No,” he said finally. “They -- they want me to go to New York. To meet with me.”

Will stopped his buttoning and stared.

“You said it was anonymous.”

“They’ll use pen name but --”

“So you’re going to go.”

“They’re paying my way.”

“You’re going to go to New York City.”

“Well I’ll come back.”

“You won’t.”

“I plan to.”

Just then it felt like they had been climbing this great mountain together and in the distance heard a landslide and it would too soon all come crashing down.

“How long have you known this,” Will said. He stumbled away from the bed and nearly fell in his haste. Somehow he thought his heart might jump out of his chest from the force of it beating.

“Since -- since the beginning. Since I pitched it to them.”

“So you were always going to leave,” said Will. His voice cracked on the last word.

Nurse stood too and opened his arms wide but looked hopeless, or helpless. But not just less. Never less. “If you’re so worried I won’t come back then why don’t you come with me.”

The word was on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to yell it: YES! But then he closed his eyes and saw instead of Nurse staring back beseeching, a little girl with brown eyes and freckles all over, and Millie with a cigarette in her mouth and her hair curled with care. He thought of Halifax and how cooped up and unsafe he felt there and knew New York City would be a thousand times worse, and he thought of his mother, and her rosary, and for some reason he thought of Eric Bittle, and said, instead, “I can’t.”

“You can’t or you won’t,” Nurse said.

Will shook his head.

“Why would you come back if you’re done writing? What is there for you here?”

Because though Nurse didn’t complain much Will knew he didn’t love the mine. Perhaps it was hard to when you hadn’t grown up with it, hadn’t been told bedtime stories about it as a child or watched your father work it his whole life, short as it was. Nurse wasn’t cut for it. His body was made for books and writing. It felt like a waste to use it for digging and picking, for his eyes to be underground so often where the green was barely distinguishable from others’. And it wasn’t just the mine -- perhaps the people weren’t as good as he’d thought, as he knew the town was, or perhaps none of it was good at all.

But -- some of it had to be. Something more than the smell of the earth after rain and the sight of train tracks criss-crossing between the thickets of prickly brambles and cranberry shrubs. More than the rows of houses with clothes hung up between them and bicycles lying on their side on the front lawns in the summer, and in the fall and winter the smell of chimney smoke and snow and mud and coal, and yeast and flour when you walked by the bakery. More than the hockey league and the baseball league and the parades and picnics and barn dances. There had to be more that was good. If nothing at all was --

Nurse laughed but it felt mirthless. “Right,” he said. “Well. Suppose you won’t be coming with me then.”

Will’s hands pressed against a still-tender bruise on the side of his neck from yesterday on accident and then he didn’t know what to do with them -- pressing it again didn’t seem like an option.

“What do you mean?” he asked. The landslide was coming closer. He could feel it rattling around in his bones.

“Fucking -- I just thought you might have a fucking idea what there is here for me but I guess not. I guess I don’t have to come back either.”

“What are you talking about? I thought you were going to.” Will back up against the doorframe and felt it hard against his spine. It anchored him -- he gripped it tight. “You just made me like this and now you’re goddamn leaving, Nurse?”

Again something like laughter but barbed came from Nurse’s mouth which had just a few minutes ago been on Will’s.

“Don’t fucking kid yourself, b’y. You were like this before me.”

There was nothing to say to that, nothing at all. A heavy burst of air punched its way out of Will’s lungs. “You were always going to leave,” he repeated. “You were always going to leave.”

“And you were always going to stay here.”

“I got no choice,” Will said.

“Then what do you want me to choose?”

They stared at each other unblinking until the slam of the front door downstairs startled them, and Will jumped away from the door and onto the landing outside of the room.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and then turned to go down the stairs. His throat was dry and his eyes for some reason prickled like when Father MacLeod used too much incense at mass.

When he rounded the corner and made his way out of the living room Archie Scott was in the kitchen, at the table with his arms crossed and a bump of tobacco in his lip.

“Archie,” Will said. He was panting, breathless, like he’d been running. His heart was still beating that fast too.

“Billy,” Archie said. A childhood name that few still used -- his mother and sister and sometimes Millie when she was feeling saucy but no one else. “Just came by to see how the house was coming along.”

“It’s -- should be done by Wednesday.”

“Saw you fixed the shingles that came off in that weather we had a few weeks ago.”

“Yeah. And chopped up the parts of the tree that were broke too. Stacked what was left in the basement.”

“Say, son.” Archie stood and stepped closer -- Will backed away. “What’s that?”

He was pointing to Will’s neck.

“Just some paint,” Will said. “Accidentally --”

“Not the paint.”

Will’s hand flew to the hickey.

“It’s --”

“You been necking,” Archie said.

“I -- I sure have.”

There was no use lying, not about that.

“What’s her name?”

“Esther Shapiro,” Will said. He didn’t think Eric would mind.

“Really,” Archie said. He stepped closer still. “From the bakery.”

“Of course.”

From behind Will there was a noise.

“Will? What are you --” came Nurse’s voice. Then, “oh. Mr. Scott, sir. What can I do for you?”

Archie narrowed his eyes and Will forced himself not to look at Nurse.

“I want November’s rent by tomorrow evening,” Archie said, “and button yourself up right.”

“Oh,” Nurse breathed.

“And you,” Archie said, turning to Will again. “Best run along home now. I been by your house and Camilla said she ain’t seen much of you lately.”

“Yes, sir.”

Archie turned and went out of the kitchen and into the porch to presumably put his boots on, and when Will turned to look at Nurse, Nurse jerked his head towards the porch with wide eyes.

“Go,” he mouthed. His shirt was indeed buttoned unevenly.

Will nodded but before turning to go he reached out his hand to briefly clasp Nurse’s fingers.

Archie was waiting for him outside and they walked down the hill in silence. In fact they walked the twenty minutes it took to reach the house in silence, and with every further step Will was certain the next would be the one where Archie said something. And there it was, again: that fear. Only this time it felt sharper, like he could feel the consequences already, and in his head he heard Nurse’s words: you were like this before me…

If that was true it meant that he would be like this after Nurse left.

And Nurse _was_ leaving.

It was out of his way as he lived on Main Street but Archie walked with Will all the way to the house before he finally spoke. “You’re on the other shift now,” he said.

The landslide was crushing Will’s lungs. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even gasp.

“You’re lucky you’re family, boy,” Archie said, then spit out a lump of chew and walked away.

The only thing that kept Will from falling to the ground was Millie’s silhouette in the window looking out.

**……**

He didn’t know what to do with himself the next day. He felt restless, shaky, unsure of his footing. Nurse would be worried, as would the others -- Eric especially. He hadn’t known how to explain the change to Millie, so all he told her was that the Company was doing some rearranging. If she believed him it was a close thing, but she didn’t seem to be in a very good mood so she let it be if she didn’t.

Wednesdays were washing days so he took Nancy for a walk while Millie did that. He pointed out the changing trees to her, and let her pick some different coloured leaves to take home and show her mother. He told her about the ducks they saw up above and how they were flying south, about winter in Springhill and about the mine. He told her that he was going to ask a friend of his to teach him to read, and that he hoped one day she would go to school and even college, though he didn’t think she understood that bit. They nearly walked into a pheasant which Nancy thought very funny, and she giggled about it for ten minutes, then he carried her back part of the way because she was tired, and tucked in his arms she turned her little face up toward the sun as she babbled in his ear.

“I’m pregnant,” is what Millie said as soon as he settled Nancy in her high chair for lunch and sat down himself to a ham sandwich and beets.

He set down the sandwich.

“What?” he said.

“I’m pregnant.” She was standing by the counter with a rag in her hand and her arms crossed over her apron.

“Mommy, we saw a, a --”

“A pheasant,” Will said. “You’re pregnant?”

“You got coal dust in your ears?”

“You can’t be,” he said, stupidly. He didn’t know what else to say.

“Well I am.”

He no longer felt hungry.

“Jack, then.”

“Yes, Jack, who else.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes,” she said, then breathed in deep. She sat next to the high chair and reached over to cut little pieces of sandwich with her fingers for Nancy. “I think we’re going to -- I know this may be sudden for you but I think Jack and I are going to move to the French shore.”

Again he couldn’t breathe. There was a loud noise in his head, ringing and like his blood rushing around within him. The pillars inside, the ones that had held him up since that stormy night, were cracking one by one.

“What,” he managed.

“Jack’s parents are down there and he said he can get a job with the same crew he used to fish with before coming here. And I think it would be good for Nancy. She’ll have to learn French, I guess.”

“You’re leaving,” he said.

You’re leaving me, is what he almost said. You’re leaving me too.

“I thought you might like to move into the lodge with the other boys, or go back home and keep renting out the other rooms until you find yourself a wife.”

“Why can’t you stay,” he said. A cruel echo of last night.

“Will,” she said, “what do you think it’s like for me here? What will it be like for Nancy?”

Not you too, he wanted to say. I don’t think I can take any more of this.

He longed, just then, for the mine, and for Angus the pit pony. For the heady power he got the first time he went down, knowing he was useful. Learning dirty jokes and swear words with the others his age for the first time, feeling big and more important than the boys just a year younger who could not yet work. He wanted above all cleanliness, for his lungs to feel pure and light once more just for a moment.

“That’s not -- people respect us. The Poindexters.”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe once they did but either way here I’ll always be that easy Collins girl.” She had dark circles under her eyes -- he hadn’t noticed before. But her hair was as perfect as ever and though her dress was old and thin it was clean and hadn’t lost its shape because she took good care of it. “Down there I’ll just be Jack’s wife.”

“His wife,” Will said. “But you’re. You’re pregnant.”

“We’ll do it as soon as we get down there. I’m not too far along that it won’t just look like the baby came early.”

“As soon as you get down there?”

“Yes, well, we want to go before winter,” she said, “and before his truck craps out. So within the next couple weeks.” She smiled briefly at Nancy who was talking to herself and her food.

“But he’s -- Jack’s a --”

“He said he’d quit for me.”

Will nearly laughed. “Surely you don’t believe that,” he said.

“No,” Millie said, then sighed. “But you know Jack. He’s gentle. And I think he really might try.”

“He’s a drunk, Millie. That’s what he is. You don’t know what he’s going to be like after he’s been drinking.”

Slowly she turned her head away from Nancy and looked at him. “He’s always drinking. So what do you want me to do.”

“Stay here,” he said, his voice falling into desperation. “Stay here and I’ll -- I’ll --”

“You’ll what, Billy. Protect me?”

“I could do better here than if you were in -- in goddamn Meteghan or Pubnico or Yarmouth or wherever.”

He cast a quick glance at Nancy but she was happily ignoring them and playing with some pieces of ham as Millie wasn’t supervising her any longer. Instead Millie was staring at him and her mouth tight. She blinked.

“Just like you protected me from your brother?”

She had never said anything so explicit before. He’d known of course -- how could he have not -- but. But he’d hoped, or wished, that it wasn’t like that, that it wasn’t… And even after the explosion, she had mourned, had she not? She had had her depressive episodes and she had cried and so Will had known then that it hadn’t been so bad after all, right?

“That ain’t -- I was just --”

“What were you. Too young? Oh, but not too young to die underground.”

The front door opened and through the house they heard Millie’s mother Ida call out a cheery hello. Millie hopped up, walked around the table, and leaned in close.

“It’s decided, Will. I’m going and you got no leg to stand on, judging me while you hang around with that Nurse fella all day long and getting your shift changed like that. Now I’m going to go tell my mother I’m moving and you are not to say a word about me being pregnant, you hear? You best stay quiet.”

“I -- you’re sure.”

She smiled and patted his hand clenched on the table. “As sure as I’ve ever been of anything in my life. Now how about after you eat you go get the ladder from the shed and clean the windows from the outside.”

There had been a time not so long ago where Will too had been sure of things. He knew there had been. And yet now he couldn’t remember what that felt like.

**……**

Will pulled Nurse behind a storage shed before he’d even been spotted -- he’d been waiting there for the day shift to pass by. If Nurse had been anyone else but himself Will would have found it hard to spot him, but the stubborn twist of his hair peeking out from his helmet and the green eyes stark against the dust were unmistakeable. Shitty had green eyes too and Jack had vivid blue but nothing so startling, so remarkable, as these.

“What are you doing?” Nurse hissed at him once he regained his wits. “Where were you?”

“Archie switched me,” Will said. He didn’t want to let go of Nurse’s arms so he held until Nurse shook him away. He felt the loss of heat on his palms now blackened keenly. “Listen, Derek, I’ve been thinking, and I think you have to --”

“Nurse!” yelled the gruff voice of Archie Scott from beyond the shed.

“Shit. Hide,” said Nurse.

“I’ll be late,” Will said.

“Knight! You seen Nurse?” The voice was getting nearer.

“You know, I haven’t since we came up on top.”

“Then go,” whispered Nurse. “Go around the back.”

Will had no choice but to go, slipping through boxes and sheds and discarded, broken shovels, and coming out near the head of the colliery, nearly bumping into Walter Miller who grunted and spat tobacco at his feet.

As he waited for the cage to take them down he prayed for the first time in a month.

**……**

He opened his eyes the next evening -- he had slept all day after his shift, though it was a fitful rest -- to Nancy crawling into bed with him. She smelled like flour, and had some smeared on her face, which he wiped away with a finger so cracked and hard against her soft, fat cheek he was afraid to leave a lasting mark.

“Tell him,” he heard Millie say from the foot of his bed. “Go on, like we practiced.”

“Happy birthday,” Nancy said, then giggled and burrowed her face in his neck.

“Oh,” he said. He kissed the top of her head. “Thank you, baby.”

In fact he had forgotten all about his birthday, but once he added it up in his head it did make sense. It was October 23rd, and today Will was twenty years old.

“There’s some cake for you after your supper,” Millie said, “and Suzanne Bittle stopped by with some raisin pie from Eric. Did you know he’s getting married this spring? She’s some excited, let me tell you.”

Shit, he thought, shit. Esther Shapiro. He needed to talk to Nurse, but Nurse was underground right now, and he also needed to finish painting the damn house unless of course Archie didn’t want him to anymore and --

“Will? You doing alright?”

“I’m -- yeah.” He sat up and hauled Nancy onto his lap where she began playing with the strings of his sleepshirt. “Did you help bake the cake, Nance?”

“No-o-o,” she said.

“You did too,” Millie said. She held out her arms and Nancy crawled over. “You helped me mix the eggs with the flour, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Nancy said. “The eggs.”

“And you got some on your face, didn’t you you little rascal.”

He let their chatter wash over him. He would absorb it while he still had the chance.

**……**

“Where’s Nurse?” was the first thing he asked when he crossed paths with the other shift. He craned his neck to look around but couldn’t see Nurse anywhere.

“You’re welcome,” Eric said. “The crust was made with Crisco yes thank you for noticing.”

“Come on,” Chowder said. He pulled Eric’s sleeve and did not meet eyes with Will. Neither did Shitty nor Jack but that last wasn’t so strange.

“It was great, thank you, you know it was great,” Will said. Actually he hadn’t had a bite of the pie yet but he knew he wasn’t lying and that it would be delicious. “Is he not with you?”

Eric frowned and pushed Chowder away. “He didn’t show up this morning. Thought maybe he’d switched shifts too. He could already have gone down.”

“I -- maybe.”

“Didn’t Archie talk to him yesterday?” Ransom said.

“For the rent I think.”

“So maybe he’s sick,” Eric said.

“He isn’t sick.”

“He could be sick,” said Ransom.

“Happy birthday,” Jack said. “Is Millie home.”

“Yes. Ida’s helping her pack. You sure you haven’t seen him?”

“Let’s go,” Shitty said, and pulled Jack and Chowder away. Eric frowned but shrugged.

“If I do see him I’ll let him know you were looking,” he said. “Happy birthday now. Have a good shift.”

Then he was left alone as men milled about him on their way to and from work. There was nothing to do but go even as the worry ate away at his stomach, as the pillars within him close to fully crumbled.

When he neared the pit head he heard a shout.

“Poindexter!”

He thought at first it was Archie but when he turned to see, it was the men, Ashley’s old friends, the ones who had given Eric his scar and worsened his dizzy spells. They were smiling but it looked wrong and ugly, and hungry.

“Fuck,” he said. They must have been waiting for him as they too were on the other shift, and were now advancing towards him. He tried to back away but stumbled into a body -- Walter Miller’s again, who grabbed his arm and held him fast when he tried to shake himself away.

“Someone wants to talk to you,” Walter said. Will was thrown forward and one of the men grabbed him with a rough hand and all but pulled him behind the lamphouse where Will had first met Nurse. If any other miners around saw -- and he was sure they did -- they said nothing.

“Billy Poindexter,” said the man who had him by the forearm.

“No, no. Billy Cocksucker,” said one of the other two. All three laughed, cruel and raucous.

“You are some fucking lucky, Billy Cocksucker,” said the first. James. His name was James Eisenor. “That Archie Scott is such a nice man.”

“Fucking angel,” said the third.

“Right. Cause if it was up to me you would have lost your job too, not just that Nurse son of bitch.”

Which explained it.

Which -- fuck, fuck, fuck. Was Nurse alright? Where was he was he okay was he alive was he hurt? If they would do this to Will what had they done to Nurse?

“What would your brother say, huh? If he saw you now, shaking like a bitch? If he knew you liked to take it up the arse?”

“Disgusting,” said one. The man reached over and unclipped Will’s helmet and slapped it to the ground in a loud clatter. Will’s head jerked from the force of it.

“Fuck you,” was all he could say.

He saw a fist flying towards him then all went dark.

**……**

When first he woke he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, the same he had fallen on a month ago, now worse than ever. And then, slowly, rocks beneath his back, then something sticky forcing his left eye shut, and finally, throbbing, an all-consuming pain above his eyebrow. It was almost fully dark, but he didn’t know what time it was. He was alone, and could barely sit up. There was vomit on his shirt, and when he wiped away the stuff from his eye he knew it was dried blood from the smell, coppery and sharp.

His watch was shattered so it was like time had stopped, though there were still the regular background sounds of the mine and of Springhill when he listened. It was a struggle to rise but he forced himself after a while. He limped to the tracks and saw no one. There were lights on in the building with offices but there were no more children playing around the pit so it must have been past suppertime. Judging by the light maybe close to eight.

He was near the number two mine entrance and could possibly go down and pretend he was alright but --

He walked away, faster and faster and with each step there was pain but it didn’t stop him until he was running.

Every heartbeat, every loud thud in his ears, sounded like one word: Nurse, Nurse, Nurse, Nurse…

**……**

The quiet of the house was eerie. Muffled, as if it existed outside of reality itself. Maybe it did, in fact, with Will’s initials still on the windowsill thoughtlessly scrawled when he still picked up a pencil regularly, and the crooked doorframe and worn-down steps and half-painted shingles. Certainly it had felt like it was its own private world for the past month, a protected and warm bubble. Until the other night at least.

Derek did not cry as he packed his things.

He did not cry as he tucked his typewriter into its case and carefully placed his essay drafts between the pages of his notebooks.

He did not cry as he sat on the bed to regain his breath after standing for a minute too long, as he had not cried when he’d been caught unawares and beat this morning after giving his rent to Archie Scott and learning he’d been fired and evicted. Though possibly his wrist was broken, and one eye was swollen shut, and his stomach was mottled with black-purple bruises all over.

He did not cry when he found one of Will’s socks under the bed and threw it in his bag on impulse.

He did not cry when he turned the light off in the room one last time.

He did not cry when he hobbled down the stairs.

He did not cry when he pulled Walter Miller’s broken pipe from his pocket and placed it on the kitchen table. In fact he even laughed a little.

He did not cry as he walked out the door and slammed it behind him.

He did not cry when he began the walk down the hill with his bags in his good hand. The train station was at least an hour’s walk away, and the next train only left in twelve hours at eight tomorrow morning, and it was cold, and he was sore all over, bruised and cut up and hurt, but he did not cry.

He did not --

 

 

 

 

 

The earth began to shake.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> From [The Lethbridge Herald on October 24th, 1958](https://www.gendisasters.com/nova-scotia/8676/springhill-ns-mine-disaster-oct-1958): Ninety-three men are feared to have died in the shattered depths of North America's deepest coal mine. Late today, figures based on latest company information in the Springhill mine disaster showed 87 missing, 81 rescued and six bodies recovered. [...] Help flowed into Springhill from welfare agencies, the armed services and private individuals. Cars with headlights lit formed about a baseball field to mark the landing place for a navy helicopter carrying blood plasma.
> 
>  
> 
> Author's notes as well as my blog can be found [here](http://bluegrasshole.tumblr.com/post/160236695416/authors-commentary-of-strange-lovers-a-nurseydex).  
> Tag (with aesthetic pictures, answered questions, thoughts, and more) [here](http://bluegrasshole.tumblr.com/tagged/strange+lovers+tag).  
> Fanmix by msculper [here](http://bluegrasshole.tumblr.com/post/160272186576/msculper-leaving-no-broken-hearts-a-strange).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [One-Way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10750296) by [Oddree13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oddree13/pseuds/Oddree13)
  * [Don't Carry Nothing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10756860) by [angeryginger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeryginger/pseuds/angeryginger)




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